Question

I’ve learn a while ago on StackOverflow that we can get the “instance ID” of any resource, for instance:

var_dump(intval(curl_init()));  // int(2)
var_dump(intval(finfo_open())); // int(3)
var_dump(intval(curl_init()));  // int(4)
var_dump(intval(finfo_open())); // int(5)
var_dump(intval(curl_init()));  // int(6)

I need something similar but applied to classes:

class foo {
    public function __construct() {
        ob_start();
        var_dump($this); // object(foo)#INSTANCE_ID (0) { }
        echo preg_replace('~.+#(\d+).+~s', '$1', ob_get_clean());
    }
}

$foo = new foo();  // 1
$foo2 = new foo(); // 2

The above works but I was hoping for a faster solution or, at least, one that didn’t involve output buffers. Please note that this won’t necessarily be used within the constructor or even inside the class itself!

spl_object_hash() is not what I’m looking for because the two objects produce identical hashes

The question previously contained an incorrect example of spl_object_hash output; ensuring that both objects exist at the same time produces hashes which are subtly different:

var_dump(spl_object_hash($foo));  // 0000000079e5f3b60000000042b31773
var_dump(spl_object_hash($foo2)); // 0000000079e5f3b50000000042b31773

Casting to int like resources doesn’t seem to work for objects:

Notice: Object of class foo could not be converted to int.

Is there a quick way to grab the same output without using object properties?

Besides var_dump(), I’ve discovered by trial and error that debug_zval_dump() also outputs the object instance, unfortunately it also needs output buffering since it doesn’t return the result.

Answer 1

spl_object_hash() could help you out here. It

returns a unique identifier for the object

which is always the same for a given instance.

EDIT after OP comment:

You could implement such a behavior using a static class property, e.g:

class MyClass 
{
    private static $_initialized = false;

    public function __construct()
    {
        if (!self::$_initialized) {
            self::$_initialized = true;
            // your run-only-once code 
        }
    }
}

But actually this has nothing to with your original question.